The Master of Environmental Design program is a two-year research-based program culminating in a Masters thesis. Started in 1967, the MED program remains one of the first and most intensive of its kind with a history that is particularly relevant today. The program has long addressed environment as the aggregate of objects, conditions, and inuences that constitute the constructed surroundings. Today that environmental scope informs many crucial contemporary issues from climate change and global inequality to digital ubiquity and the influence of large socio-technical organizations. A return to the origins of the program also energizes an activist conception of design. Positioned beyond client consumption or the cultural production of galleries, to design, in this context, is to create conditions for change that address urgent situations in the present. Studying the history and theory of architecture, urbanism and landscape and their intersections with broader cultural aesthetics and politics, developing a voice for architectural criticism and public scholarship.